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Former national security adviser says in new book that president withheld Ukraine aid for political favors, asked Chinese president to help him win 2020 race

WASHINGTON—President Trump’s decision-making consistently prioritized his re-election and his family’s well-being ahead of the national interest, according to a new book from his former national security adviser, John Bolton, who describes “obstruction of justice as a way of life” inside the Trump White House and denounces what he says is the president’s penchant to “give personal favors to dictators he liked.”

In a scathing account of his 17 months working for the president, Mr. Bolton describes Mr. Trump as “stunningly uninformed,” easily swayed by authoritarian leaders and often the subject of scorn among his own advisers. Among the episodes he recounts are June 2019 meetings with Chinese President Xi Jinping in which he says Mr. Trump pleaded with his counterpart to help him win re-election by purchasing agricultural products from the U.S. and gave China his blessing to continue building camps for Uighur Muslims, which Mr. Bolton likened to concentration camps.

Mr. Trump broadly defended his handling of foreign policy issues in an interview, including his decision to reverse penalties on Chinese companies as part of his trade negotiations. He denied giving Mr. Xi approval for Uighur camps in China and sharply criticized Mr. Bolton.

“He is a liar,” Mr. Trump told The Wall Street Journal, adding that “everybody in the White House hated John Bolton.”

Mr. Bolton echoes allegations that were at the center of the president’s impeachment trial, writing that Mr. Trump repeatedly ordered White House officials to withhold military assistance from Ukraine as retribution for perceived slights during the 2016 election and as leverage to pressure the country to investigate Joe Biden, then a potential and now his presumed election opponent this year. Mr. Bolton describes the objective as a fantasy based on conspiracy theories pushed by Rudy Giuliani, the president’s personal attorney.

“Ukraine tried to take me down. I’m not f—ing interested in helping them,” Mr. Trump is quoted in the book as saying during a White House meeting in May 2019. Mr. Trump and some GOP allies have advanced an unfounded theory that Ukraine, and not Russia, interfered in the 2016 election and that a hacked Democratic National Committee computer server had ended up in Ukraine.

“I want the f—ing DNC server,” Mr. Trump is quoted as saying.

Mr. Bolton says he discussed with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Defense Secretary Mark Esper how to persuade the president to release the aid to Ukraine. “We could have confronted Trump directly, trying to refute the Giuliani theories and arguing that it was impermissible to leverage U.S. government authorities for personal political gain,” he writes. “We almost certainly would have failed.”

The former adviser defends his decision not to participate in the House’s impeachment inquiry, and said if Democratic leaders had widened their probe beyond the Ukraine matter, there might have been a higher likelihood of persuading Republicans that the president had committed “high crimes and misdemeanors.

The GOP-led Senate acquitted Mr. Trump of both impeachment articles approved by the House, in a largely party-line vote in February.

Even for an administration that has seen no shortage of critical tell-alls, “The Room Where It Happened” is a remarkable rebuke of a sitting president by one of his own former senior advisers and, as Mr. Bolton describes it, a warning to conservatives ahead of the 2020 election. The U.S. on Tuesday sued Mr. Bolton for breach of contract, seeking to block the June 23 publication of the 577-page book, a copy of which was obtained by The Wall Street Journal. The lawsuit also asks a court to establish a constructive trust, which would require Mr. Bolton to turn over his book advance and royalties to the government.

The Journal published an excerpt from the book on Wednesday.

The Justice Department escalated its case against Mr. Bolton late Wednesday, filing an emergency request for the court to issue a temporary restraining order and injunction to block publication of Mr. Bolton’s book and prohibit his publisher from disseminating it.

The filing included affidavits from multiple senior intelligence officials alleging the current manuscript including classified information, including the top U.S. counterintelligence official, William Evanina, and National Security Agency director Paul Nakasone, who said that disclosure of some of the classified information contained in the manuscript “could result in the permanent loss of a valuable” intelligence source and cause “irreparable damage” to the U.S. signals intelligence system.

The government asked for a court hearing on Friday, in advance of the book’s June 23 publication date.

The Justice Department, which alleged in its Tuesday lawsuit that Mr. Bolton had provided classified information to people not authorized to receive it when he shared his manuscript with others, is also investigating whether Mr. Bolton’s actions amounted to a crime, according to a person familiar with the matter. The Justice Department declined to comment.

Simon & Schuster, the publisher of Mr. Bolton’s book, said in a statement: “Tonight’s filing by the government is a frivolous, politically motivated exercise in futility” because the book has already been distributed. “The injunction as requested by the government would accomplish nothing.”

Democrats had previously criticized Mr. Bolton for not voluntarily testifying during the impeachment inquiry and renewed that complaint Wednesday. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D., Calif.) noted that some of Mr. Bolton’s aides had chosen to testify.

“When Bolton was asked, he refused, and said he’d sue if subpoenaed. Instead, he saved it for a book,” Mr. Schiff said on Twitter. “Bolton may be an author, but he’s no patriot.”

Mr. Biden on Wednesday said what the book describes as the president’s behavior was disgraceful.

“If these accounts are true, it’s not only morally repugnant, it’s a violation of Donald Trump’s sacred duty to the American people to protect America’s interests and defend our values,” he said.

China trade negotiations

The book details what Mr. Bolton says were repeated instances of Mr. Trump prioritizing a potential trade deal with China and his own political interests over other issues, including enforcement of U.S. sanctions and human-rights concerns.

During a meeting with China’s Mr. Xi in Osaka, Japan, Mr. Bolton writes, Mr. Trump turned the conversation to this year’s U.S. presidential election, pleading with Mr. Xi to help him win, stressing the importance of farmers and increased Chinese purchases of soybeans and wheat to the electoral outcome.

At the opening of that Group of 20 summit, when only interpreters were present, Mr. Bolton says the U.S. president gave Mr. Xi his blessing for Beijing to continue building camps for Uighur Muslims in China. “Trump said that Xi should go ahead with building the camps, which Trump thought was exactly the right thing to do,” he writes.

At the time, the Trump administration was considering sanctions on China for its treatment of Uighurs, more than a million of whom have been detained without trial in the past three years, according to academic researchers.

Mr. Trump opposed sanctions over the ethnic minority issues in China because of the trade negotiations, according to the book. “We could cross repression of the Uighurs off our list of possible reasons to sanction China, at least as long as trade negotiations continued,” Mr. Bolton writes.

Shortly after the news media began publishing details of the Bolton book, the White House confirmed the president had signed the Uighur Human Rights Policy Act, which condemns human rights abuses in China’s Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous region.

U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, who attended the Osaka meeting between the two leaders, said Wednesday that no such conversation occurred in his presence. “Absolutely untrue. Never happened. I was there,” he said.

West Wing decision-making

Mr. Bolton, whose 17 months as Mr. Trump’s national security adviser ended in September 2019, writes that one of the few guardrails on the president has been his re-election and predicts that Mr. Trump would be “far less constrained” in a second term. “I am hard-pressed to identify any significant Trump decision during my tenure that wasn’t driven by reelection calculations,” Mr. Bolton writes.

The president also often put his own family’s interests ahead of the country’s, Mr. Bolton writes. Mr. Trump in 2018 issued a vociferous, exclamation-point-riddled defense of Saudi Arabia in which he dismissed U.S. intelligence conclusions that the Saudi crown prince had ordered the killing of a dissident journalist—a statement that Mr. Bolton says was intended to distract from news stories about Ivanka Trump’s use of her personal email account for government business.

“This will divert from Ivanka,” Mr. Bolton quotes the president as saying about his daughter and senior adviser.

Outside the Oval Office, the president is surrounded by advisers who criticize him behind his back, Mr. Bolton says. He describes a meeting in which he says Mr. Pompeo passed him a note referring to the president that said, “He is so full of shit.”

Mr. Bolton characterizes the atmosphere of the West Wing as chaotic and closer to that of a college dormitory. Senior officials, including Mr. Pompeo, former chief of staff John Kelly and Mr. Bolton himself considered resigning on multiple occasions, he writes.

Dealings with foreign leaders

Mr. Bolton, who has served in the past four Republican presidential administrations, says that Mr. Trump was motivated by conspiracy theories and uninformed about matters ranging from White House management to global affairs.

Mr. Trump expressed surprise during a June 2018 meeting with then-U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May that her country possessed nuclear weapons, Mr. Bolton says. In an August 2018 meeting at the White House, Mr. Trump asserted that Venezuela was “really part of the United States” and requested military options to invade the South American country, according to the book.

The president is described as erratic, childlike and foolish. Mr. Bolton writes that the president “saw conspiracies behind rocks” and was easily manipulated by White House aides and foreign leaders. In one example, according to the book, Russian President Vladimir Putin deployed “a brilliant display of Soviet-style propaganda” on a May 2019 call with the U.S. president that “largely persuaded Trump” and led to a later decision to go easy on additional Venezuela sanctions.

Mr. Trump told Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan that Halkbank, a Turkish lender facing charges of evading U.S. sanctions on Iran, was “totally innocent,” Mr. Bolton writes. The president’s pronouncement, made during a meeting at the 2018 Group of 20 summit in Buenos Aires, came after Mr. Trump flipped through a memo prepared by the bank’s attorneys that Mr. Erdogan had handed him, according to the book.

Mr. Erdogan wanted a case dropped against Halkbank official Mehmet Atilla because of allegations the Turkish president and his family used the bank for personal purposes and frequently asked Mr. Trump about it, Mr. Bolton says.

After declaring the bank guilt-free, Mr. Trump asked his national security adviser to call Matthew Whitaker, then the acting attorney general—a request Mr. Bolton says he sidestepped as the two leaders continued talking. Mr. Trump assured Mr. Erdogan he would “take care of things,” according to the book, saying he would replace the U.S. prosecutors who had brought the case in the Southern District of New York.

Mr. Bolton says the president’s promise was “all nonsense” since the prosecutors were career Justice Department employees and not political appointees. “It was as though Trump was trying to show he had as much arbitrary authority as Erdogan,” he writes.

Telecom talks with Beijing

The president was also convinced to reverse U.S. law-enforcement actions during a phone call with Mr. Xi in June 2019 in which the Chinese president warned the two countries’ relationship was at risk over the Trump administration’s handling of Huawei Technologies Co., Mr. Bolton writes. The Chinese smartphone and wireless company had been banned from doing business with U.S. companies over sanctions violations. Mr. Trump told Mr. Xi that the company could be part of the trade deal he was seeking, according to the book.

During their G-20 meeting two weeks later, Mr. Xi continued pushing on Huawei, “sensing weakness” in Mr. Trump, Mr. Bolton writes. When Mr. Xi agreed to include Huawei in the trade talks, Mr. Trump agreed to lift the then-month-old ban, he says.

Mr. Bolton says that at his and others’ urging, Mr. Trump later balked at the reversal. But using Huawei as a bargaining chip in the trade negotiations was “ignoring both the significance of the criminal case and also the far larger threat Huawei posed to the security” of 5G telecom systems world-wide,” he writes.

Mr. Trump also sought favor with Mr. Xi during trade negotiations, according to Mr. Bolton, by removing crippling financial penalties on ZTE Corp., the Chinese telecom giant that had been prosecuted for violating U.S. sanctions on Iran and North Korea, and moving to do the same with Huawei.

During a phone call with Mr. Xi in May 2018, a few weeks after the penalties had been announced, Mr. Trump told his Chinese counterpart that he viewed his administration’s punishment of ZTE as harsh and that he had ordered Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross to “work something out for China,” according to the book.

Mr. Xi thanked Mr. Trump and said he would owe the U.S. president a favor, Mr. Bolton writes. Mr. Trump replied that he was doing this because of Mr. Xi’s request. “I was stunned by the unreciprocated nature of this concession,” Mr. Bolton writes. “This was policy by personal whim and impulse.”

Mr. Bolton said he raised concerns about the president’s handling of Halkbank, ZTE and Huawei with Attorney General William Barr, White House counsel Pat Cipollone and John Eisenberg, the chief White House national security attorney.

Mr. Bolton says Mr. Barr told him that he was “very worried about the appearances Trump was creating, especially his remarks on Halkbank to Erdogan in Buenos Aires.” Mr. Cipollone “was plainly stunned at Trump’s approach to law enforcement, or lack thereof,” Mr. Bolton writes.

Senior White House leaders

Mr. Bolton is critical of many members of Mr. Trump’s senior staff: Nikki Haley, then the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, operated like a “free electron” who “was motivated by her desire not to get hammered in the press.” Mr. Pompeo’s overriding philosophy in managing the State Department was “conflict avoidance.” Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin forcefully weighed in on foreign policy decisions even when “he manifestly had no idea what he was talking about.” Former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis “knew how to flatter with the best of them” but “was no debater.”

Senior White House adviser and Mr. Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, according to the book, was involved in “international negotiations he shouldn’t have been doing”—a view Mr. Bolton says was shared by other foreign leaders, including Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Mr. Netanyahu was “dubious” about Mr. Kushner taking on Middle East peace and “wondered why Kushner thought he would succeed where the likes of Kissinger had failed,” Mr. Bolton writes.

The former national security adviser said Mr. Trump showed little loyalty despite prizing it above all else. Mr. Bolton says the president discussed with him a proposal to replace Vice President Mike Pence—seen as among the most loyal officials in the administration—from the ticket in 2020 to appeal to a wider spectrum of voters.

While Mr. Bolton describes himself as registering alarm at the president’s actions as early as the transition, he details few instances in which he directly confronted Mr. Trump, instead mostly preferring to remain silent or brief other officials on his concerns.

He says the president’s Ukraine dealings were ultimately a factor in his resignation, which came nearly three months after Mr. Bolton first learned that Mr. Trump was considering withholding aid to Ukraine.

Mr. Bolton does describe at least one matter on which he says the two men were in agreement: “Much was made of his purported dislike of my mustache,” Mr. Bolton wrote of the president. “For what it’s worth, he told me it was never a factor, noting that his father also had one.”